Gartner has its figures for PC sales. Worldwide, Asus and Lenovo seeing lots of growth, Dell and HP losing lots of sales, Apple doesn't register in the top 5. Overall, the market remained flat. If you take a narrow view of the world and only focus on the US, things look different. In the US, everybody loses, and only Apple sees minor growth. All this excludes tablet sales, but considering people are hammering on and on and on about how it's a post-PC device, I think it makes sense to exclude it. You can't have your cake, and eat it too. Then again, who cares.

I got one of these for my bday a week ago. I'm quite impressed with it over previous versions of android on other tablets I've used. I rate it better than the iPad 3's we use at work. 15 hours battery life and keyboard rock. Overall wrapped with the device.

That is just marketing BS. As someone who has been fixing and building Pcs since the days of Win 3.X let me give you the REAL scoop....PCs passed "good enough" and went straight into "insanely overpowered" several years ago.

Take my dad as an example, he is the classic "average user" in that he watches youtube, does chat, checks his webmail, surfs, just the most bog standard average stuff. He has a bottom of the line Phenom quad i got for him like 4 years ago on sale. Know what I found? he has yet to get it above 45% CPU usage. I set up monitoring for 2 weeks, checked his stats, he just isn't able to peg even that 4 year old quad. I found the same for his Core duo based office box, just not slamming at all.

So it isn't a "post PC" world, its just that the OEMs got spoiled by the MHz wars and thought the party would never end but once multicores became cheap the average user simply didn't have enough work to keep the chips fed. i have several business customers that are likewise happy with their Phenom Is and Core Duos, even i sold my full size laptop for an E350 EEE netbook because i found when I'm mobile i'm simply not using that many cycles and the smaller size was worth more to me that extra cycles I'm not using. I can see why asus went up BTW, those EEEs are some nice netbooks, light and great battery life.

So PCs aren't going anywhere, its simply a mature market. people will keep them until they die and then buy another one, no different than washers and dryers. There will still be enough sold to keep PCs being made, just maybe some consolidation in the industry but PCs aren't going anywhere, we just haven't had a "killer app" that can slam a modern multicore and with an economic downturn people aren't replacing perfectly good systems when there is nothing wrong with them. The programs the average user runs will feel the same on a Phenom I quad or on a new 12 core, so kinda pointless to buy a new one before the old one dies.

Perhaps a bit expensive now, due to some typical early distortions - but long-term, they should become quite affordable typically (also quickly approaching "good enough" hence lasting), and as you say able to fulfil most of typical stuff that people do.

Maybe we'll largely go back to "one PC per household" - plus few tablets. Might very well end up less expensive, overall.

Frankly, dual-core is plenty for most users. I'm surprised your father even managed to get up to 45% utilization. Perhaps he was running a web browser, in which Javascript had hung one tab (100% of one core), and another tab was running Flash (80% of a second core).

And actually, the OEMs still haven't gotten themselves out of the MHz-war mindset. They are still overbuying on CPUs and underbuying on other components. (I suppose that's why Intel is still making boatloads of money.) For example, cutting $20 off the CPU budget for a given configuration would pay for a hybrid hard drive, which would greatly improve the user-perceived performance.

But then, OEMs have always made strange decisions when it came to system configuration. I remember in 2003-2006, it was quite common to find a configuration with: (1) a gigantic hard drive (2) not enough RAM (3) Windows XP Media Center Edition (4) no TV tuner. Why did they preload XP Media Center if the computer didn't have a TV tuner? They should've instead preloaded XP Home and spent the savings on more RAM.

In the Vista/7 timeframe, it was quite common to find OEM-preloaded DVD playback software on systems with Windows Home Premium. This also made no sense, because they were paying the DVD licensing fees twice. The savings from cutting out the duplicate licensing could've paid for the removal of most of the preloaded crapware, which again would have dramatically improved the user experience.

No, I won't be shedding any tears for the OEMs. They dug themselves into their own hole. It's true that they faced a brutally-competitive market, but they made enough boneheaded decisions to destroy their own margins.

In the Vista/7 timeframe, it was quite common to find OEM-preloaded DVD playback software on systems with Windows Home Premium. This also made no sense, because they were paying the DVD licensing fees twice. The savings from cutting out the duplicate licensing could've paid for the removal of most of the preloaded crapware, which again would have dramatically improved the user experience.

Like they also do with WLAN and Bluetooth managers/drivers, even though Windows supports them out of the box since XP days?

It seemed to me that native Wi-Fi support was added to XP through SP1 or SP2, and that even Windows 7 still did not provide native support for basic Bluetooth functionality such as OBEX file transfers. Did I get it wrong ?

Like they also do with WLAN and Bluetooth managers/drivers, even though Windows supports them out of the box since XP days?

And battery, and sound card, and video card, and ... Heck, I've even seen systems where the OEM switched all the Media Player and Photo Viewer file associations over to some bundled crapware.

The problem with the OEMs is that they think they can compete based on what they can list on the sticker. All the intangibles get neglected -- and yet these often have a greater effect on the usability of the system than the raw specs.

And actually, the OEMs still haven't gotten themselves out of the MHz-war mindset. They are still overbuying on CPUs and underbuying on other components. (I suppose that's why Intel is still making boatloads of money.)

Maybe things will come around. Because, it wasn't always like that - consider how Atari 2600 and NES had essentially the same CPU - launched in mid-70s, still in some then-new machines in mid-80s. Similar with Motorola 68k - launch at the turn of 70s/80s, still found in some newly introduced machines in early 90s. Clocks not much different.
PCs also had such period: while 386 was launched in 1985, XT and AT-class machines remained fairly standard for a long time - and AMD 386 (after it was finally cleared by courts...) was still able to be a big success in early 90s.

It was more about support & gfx chips ("GPU"), amount of memory... So just like now, more or less, except without any usage scenario in sight which would significantly bump the need for CPU power, like ~multimedia did in the 90s (that, and the success of "Intel Inside" & bunny suits men campaigns).

My company was buying HP laptops but the screens we're cracking at a high rate and the users kept telling us I just opened it... the casing the LCD was in would flex well beyond what was reasonable if you opened it from the corner. We switched to the Lenovo Edge series more than 6 months ago not many issues with them, although Lenovo support is not the greatest.

There seems to be only two names in high-end laptops. Other manufacturers try to get into the market, for instance HP has a business line of laptops, but they cost twice as much and ThinkPads, and they are not even ThinkPads!!

Only two makes high-end laptop with a decent profit, everybody else are trying to get into the same market by charging obscene profits. Not sure what the fuck is wrong with them.. Come on, I like my ThinkPad, but I hate sounding like a fanboy, so come on a give me a viable alternate!!

If you want a Laptop that quite frankly comes with some of the best keyboards around even on the low-end models, get a Lenovo. One of the best keyboards I've ever seen on a laptop has to be the one on the Lenovo B560-433028U which Best Buy sold for $320. I mean the keyboard on that machine blows away anything I've ever seen on a Apple or Dell product, and I'm talking about high-end machines priced well over $1,000